The very hours when solitude grows

McClatchy Newspapers (MCT) - Solitude has become a dirty word in our culture.

Or maybe it has just become irrelevant. It's hard to have contempt for something when you don't know what it is.

See the woman on the jogging trail, seemingly talking to a nature spirit, till you realize she's blabbing into her Black Berry headset. See the man on the freeway, cell phone jammed into his ear, one hand on the wheel, begging for a fender bender. See, especially, kids everywhere, fingers busy texting their peers when they're supposed to be trying to avoid your shopping cart at the grocery store.

"I love mankind. It's people I can't stand." So said Linus in a classic "Peanuts" strip.

Allow me to reconfigure the sentiments of this sage. I have no problem with humankind, even large gatherings of them. I go to football games frequently to suffer with other fans. I really dig barbecues. Why, I've even shown up on occasion at some of the most emotionally taxing social gatherings known to humanity _ the child's birthday party.

But sometimes being face to face with other faces just can't be faced anymore. And guess what? The desire to be alone for a time, to recharge and replenish the soul, is not neurotic. It is, indeed, healthy.

According to Psychology Today, "Loneliness is marked by a sense of isolation. Solitude, on the other hand, is a state of being alone without being lonely and can lead to self-awareness."

That's fairly well-put. Better still this quote from Henry David Thoreau's Walden: "I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude."

Yet for half a century now, our culture has been trying to mash us all together. The field of psychology itself has had to learn the lesson that privacy has value. In Ken Kesey's 1962 novel, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," mental patient Randle Patrick McMurphy challenges the Authoritarian Groupspeak of the hospital's administration:

"You mean it's sick to want to be off by yourself?"

"I didn't say that_"

"You mean if I go into (the) latrine to relieve myself I should take at least seven buddies to keep me from brooding on the can?"

Of course, depression _ true depression _ is no laughing matter, and treatment for severe cases generally does involve group therapy and activities. Adolescent angst also can be perilous, yet if we worry about teens too much, we deprive them of the time for self-reflection that youth requires to mature into adulthood.

I recall being 17 years old and solitary. My father's job had changed, and we had moved to Kansas City the summer between my junior and senior years of high school. Friendless in the weeks before the new school year began, I saw not abject loneliness but a chance to deck out my new room with Who posters and read about a quarter-ton of science fiction.

My mother told me later my father was annoyed and anxious about my hermitage. To mollify him, she would pop in and check on me.

"What's he doing in there?" my father would ask her.

"Reading and listening to music."

"Is he coming out for dinner?"

"He didn't say."

"Well ... he sure does have a strange life."

No, Dad. With all due respect, I had the life I needed at the time.

Now, against my will, I have that life again. For about a month, I've been a widower. I can't deny it; there is sadness in this solitude. But that is as it should be.

At first the silence of the house shattered me. So the TV would be blaring some inane comedy, or I'd have the hi-fi up as loud as I could play it, with Led Zeppelin or Miles Davis shaking the walls.

Already, though, this is changing. The tickings and sighings of my old house are becoming more comfortable. Upstairs as I write, one of the dogs patrols a hardwood floor, toenails clicking, barely audible.

It is natural for us to reach out to our fellows for camaraderie, for healing, for pleasure. It is natural also for us to look within, to make time for quiet times so the world is not too much with us, to paraphrase the great English poet William Wordsworth.

Home should be a refuge when cares and conversation have tipped life's scales toward heavy pandemonium.

A meditation room is not an extravagance.

A good book should be read alone.

There is no law that says you always have to answer the phone.

Time passed in solitude is time well-spent.

Then, when it's time, the doors to house and heart are opened again, and once more we seek the world _ not forgetting the debt we owe to Good Friend Solitude.

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John Mark Eberhart: jeberhart@kcstar.com

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© 2008, The Kansas City Star.